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AP Decision Notes: What to expect in New York’s special congressional election

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans’ majority could tighten by another vote after Tuesday’s special congressional election in Buffalo — at least, temporarily.

Voters are choosing a replacement for Democrat Brian Higgins, a longtime House member who cited the “slow and frustrating” pace of Congress before resigning in February. Democrats have a long record of success in the 26th Congressional District, and their nominee is highly favored to win on Tuesday.

Rather than holding a traditional primary, local party officials handpick the nominees in New York special elections for Congress. Democrats chose Buffalo state Sen. Tim Kennedy, while Republicans nominated West Seneca Town Supervisor Gary Dickson.

After a messy redistricting process in 2022, New York just recently approved new congressional maps, which will go into effect for the 2024 election. For now, New York is filling Higgins’ vacancy under the old congressional lines. However, the 26th District changes very little under the revised maps, which means whoever wins the special election to fill the remainder of Higgins’ term will face a similar electorate in November.

A Democratic victory would shrink Republicans’ 218-212 majority by one member — but not necessarily for long. Three special elections in previously Republican-held districts are on the calendar before the end of June.

Here’s a look at what to expect on Tuesday:

The congressional district election will be held on Tuesday. Polls close at 9 p.m. ET.

The Associated Press will provide coverage for the special election in New York’s 26th Congressional District. Kennedy’s name appears on the ballot under the Democratic Party and the Working Families Party. Dickson appears as the nominee for the Republican and Conservative parties.

Any voter registered in New York’s 26th Congressional District may participate in this special election.

New York’s 26th runs along the Niagara River, which separates western New York from Canada. Most of the Republican vote in the district stems from the area that falls in Niagara County, at its northern tip. However, that’s the least populous portion of the district. Most of the votes come from the southern part of the district in Erie County, which leans heavily toward Democrats.

Democrats have been successful in the congressional district in recent elections. Higgins represented a House seat in Buffalo for two decades, and Joe Biden carried the district by double digits in 2020 when he defeated President Donald Trump.

For lots of voters in the congressional district, the two nominees will be familiar names. For over a decade, Kennedy has represented Buffalo in the state Senate in a district that overlaps with the 26th Congressional District. Dickson, meanwhile, appeared on the ballot in West Seneca in 2019 and 2023, though in a much smaller election for town supervisor.

Dickson said he believes his path to victory depends on not only consolidating votes in the northern portion of the district but also winning over working-class voters in the southeast corner and flipping suburban voters who are frustrated with high taxes in Amherst. As of the latest filing deadline on April 10, Kennedy’s campaign had spent 50 times more on the race than Dickson’s had.

The AP does not make projections and will declare a winner only when it’s determined there is no scenario that would allow the trailing candidates to close the gap. If a race has not been called, the AP will continue to cover any newsworthy developments, such as candidate concessions or declarations of victory. In doing so, the AP will make clear that it has not yet declared a winner and explain why.

A recount is required if a candidate wins by 20 votes or fewer or by less than half a percentage point. The AP may declare a winner in a race that is eligible for a recount if it can determine the lead is too large for a recount or legal challenge to change the outcome.

As of Nov. 1, there were 512,774 registered voters in New York’s 26th Congressional District. Of those, nearly 50% were Democrats and 22% were Republicans. The last race for the district took place in November 2022. At the time, 48% of registered voters turned out.

But there’s been another House special election in New York more recently, when Democrat Tom Suozzi replaced Republican George Santos on Long Island in February. As of Nov. 1, there were more than 570,000 registered voters in the 3rd District, and about 30% voted in the special election.

Santos had won office in what had been a reliably Democratic district partly by falsely portraying himself as an American success story — a son of working-class immigrants who made himself into a wealthy Wall Street dealmaker. But many elements of Santos’ life story were later exposed as fabrications, and he was indicted on multiple charges including allegations he stole money from Republican donors. He has pleaded not guilty.

Ahead of Tuesday’s special election, just over 8,700 early votes had been cast by April 23. Nearly 69% of those early votes came from registered Democrats, while 19% came from Republicans.

In the 2022 election, the AP first reported results at 9:43 p.m. ET, or 43 minutes after polls closed. The election night tabulation ended at 11 p.m. ET, with about 86 % of total votes counted.


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The Latest | Trump’s hush money trial will resume with cross-examination of ex-tabloid publisher

NEW YORK (AP) — Defense lawyers in Donald Trump’s hush money trial are poised Friday to dig into an account of the former publisher of the National Enquirer and his efforts to protect Trump from negative stories during the 2016 election.

David Pecker will return to the witness stand for the fourth day as defense attorneys try to poke holes in his testimony, which has described helping bury embarrassing stories Trump feared could hurt his campaign.

Pecker so far has painted a tawdry portrait of “catch and kill” tabloid schemes — catching a potentially damaging story by buying the rights to it and then killing it through agreements that prevent the paid person from telling the story to anyone else.

The cross-examination, which began Thursday, will cap a consequential week in the criminal cases the former president is facing as he vies to reclaim the White House in November.

The charges center on $130,000 in payments that Trump’s company made to his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen. He paid that sum on Trump’s behalf to keep porn actor Stormy Daniels from going public with her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier. Trump has denied the encounter ever happened.

Prosecutors say Trump obscured the true nature of those payments and falsely recorded them as legal expenses. He has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

The case is the first-ever criminal trial of a former U.S. president and the first of four prosecutions of Trump to reach a jury.

Currently:

— Key moments from the Supreme Court arguments on Donald Trump’s immunity claims

— Trading Trump: Truth Social’s first month of trading has sent investors on a ride

— These people were charged with interfering in the 2020 election. Some are still in politics today

— Key players: Who’s who at Donald Trump’s hush money criminal trial

— The hush money case is just one of Trump’s legal cases. See the others here

Here’s the latest:

Even by National Enquirer standards, testimony by its former publisher David Pecker at Donald Trump’s hush money trial this week has revealed an astonishing level of corruption at America’s best-known tabloid and may one day be seen as the moment it effectively died.

“It just has zero credibility,” said Lachlan Cartwright, executive editor of the Enquirer from 2014 to 2017. “Whatever sort of credibility it had was totally damaged by what happened in court this week.”

On Thursday, Pecker was back on the witness stand to tell more about the arrangement he made to boost Trump’s presidential candidacy in 2016, tear down his rivals and silence any revelations that may have damaged him.

A change in the court schedule means Donald Trump won’t be forced off the campaign trail next week to attend a hearing in his hush money criminal trial in New York.

Judge Juan M. Merchan moved a hearing on the former president’s alleged gag order violations to next Thursday, avoiding a conflict with his scheduled campaign events next Wednesday.

Merchan had initially set the hearing for next Wednesday, the trial’s regular off day. Trump is scheduled to hold campaign events that day in Michigan and Wisconsin. His lawyers have urged the judge not to hold any proceedings on Wednesdays so he can campaign.

The hearing — now set for 9:30 a.m. next Thursday, May 2 — pertains to a prosecution request that Trump be penalized for violating his gag order this week on four separate occasions.

The order bars Trump from making comments about witnesses and others connected to the case. Merchan is already mulling holding Trump in contempt of court and fining him up to $10,000 for other alleged gag order violations.


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Takeaways from AP’s investigation into fatal police encounters involving injections of sedatives

The practice of giving sedatives to people detained by police spread quietly across the nation over the last 15 years, built on questionable science and backed by police-aligned experts, an investigation led by The Associated Press has found.

At least 94 people died after they were given sedatives and restrained by police from 2012 through 2021, according to findings by the AP in collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS) and the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism. That’s nearly 10% of the more than 1,000 deaths identified during the investigation of people subdued by police in ways that are not supposed to be fatal.

Supporters say sedatives enable rapid treatment for drug-related behavioral emergencies and psychotic episodes, protect front-line responders from violence and are safely administered thousands of times annually to get people with life-threatening conditions to hospitals. Critics say forced sedation should be strictly limited or banned, arguing the medications, given without consent, are too risky to be administered during police encounters.

The injections spanned the country, from a desert in Arizona to a street in St. Louis to a home in Florida. They happened in big cities such as Dallas, suburbs like Lithonia, Georgia, and rural areas such as Dale, Indiana. They occurred in homes, in parking lots, in ambulances and occasionally in hospitals where police encounters came to a head.

It was impossible to determine the role sedatives may have played in each of the 94 deaths, which often involved the use of other potentially dangerous force on people who had taken drugs or consumed alcohol. Medical experts told the AP their impact could be negligible in people who were already dying; the final straw that triggered heart or breathing failure in the medically distressed; or the main cause of death when given in the wrong circumstances or mishandled.

While sedatives were mentioned as a cause or contributing factor in a dozen official death rulings, authorities often didn’t even investigate whether injections were appropriate. Medical officials have traditionally viewed them as mostly benign treatments. Now some say they may be playing a bigger role than previously understood and deserve more scrutiny.

Here are takeaways from AP’s investigation:

The investigation found that about half those who died after injections were Black.

Behind the racial disparity is a disputed medical condition called excited delirium, which fueled the rise of sedation outside hospitals. Critics say its purported symptoms, including “superhuman strength” and high pain tolerance, play into racist stereotypes about Black people and lead to biased decisions about who needs sedation.

Guidelines require paramedics to make rapid, subjective assessments of the potential dangers posed by the people they treat. Only those judged to be at high risk of harming themselves or others are supposed to be candidates for shots.

But the investigation found that some whose behavior did not meet the bar — who had already largely calmed down or in rare cases even passed out — were given injections. In some cases, paramedics cited fears that people would become violent on the way to hospitals.

The 2019 death of Elijah McClain in Aurora, Colorado, put a spotlight on the practice. A paramedic convicted of giving McClain an overdose of ketamine was sentenced last month to five years in prison, and a second paramedic is scheduled to be sentenced Friday.

Time and time again, the AP found, agitated people who were held by police facedown, often handcuffed and with officers pushing on their backs, struggled to breathe and tried to get free. Citing combativeness, paramedics administered sedatives, further slowing their breathing. Cardiac and respiratory arrest often occurred within minutes.

Paramedics drugged people who were not a threat to themselves or others, violating treatment guidelines. Medics often didn’t know whether other drugs or alcohol were in people’s systems, although some combinations cause serious side effects.

Police officers sometimes suggested paramedics should give shots to suspects they were detaining, a potential abuse of their power.

The majority of those who died had been restrained facedown in handcuffs, which can restrict breathing.

Experts say giving sedatives to someone who is already struggling to breathe can create a risk for death, because the drugs slow the respiratory drive. If they are unable to get enough oxygen and blow off enough carbon dioxide, their hearts can stop or they can stop breathing.

The use of sedatives by emergency medical responders outside hospitals spread rapidly over the last two decades based on a now-discredited theory. Law enforcement leaders in the 2000s were concerned by the number of people who were dying after they were shocked with police Tasers and forcibly restrained.

They began promoting a new strategy calling for officers to view encounters with severely agitated people, including those experiencing psychotic episodes or high on drugs, as medical emergencies. Rather than use force to try to gain compliance, officers were encouraged to call emergency medical services to sedate people and transport them to hospitals.

Supporters of this approach promoted a term to describe behavior they said put combative people at risk of sudden death: excited delirium.

The strategy received a boost in 2009 when the American College of Emergency Physicians recognized excited delirium and urged the rapid use of ketamine, midazolam and other drugs to treat it.

EMS agencies quickly adopted excited delirium protocols, though drugs like ketamine had not been thoroughly studied in the field. The paramedics who injected McClain with ketamine said they were following one such policy.

Critics have argued that the concept of excited delirium shifts blame from police in the deaths. The National Association of Medical Examiners and the American College of Emergency Physicians distanced themselves from the concept in 2023.

Deaths involving police often result in news headlines and criminal investigations that focus on the use of force by officers. But the AP investigation found that medical personnel who gave sedatives were often largely ignored.

The use of sedatives in nearly half the deaths has not been previously reported by news outlets. Many reasons explain this lack of attention.

Police narratives omit the use of sedatives due to medical privacy concerns. EMS treatment records are not subject to public records laws. Medical examiners view sedatives as treatments and rarely cite them as contributing factors in deaths. Investigators are unknowledgeable about the role sedatives play and uninterested in diving into the complicated details.

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Associated Press researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.

___ The Associated Press receives support from the Public Welfare Foundation for reporting focused on criminal justice. This story also was supported by Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures. Also, the AP Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

___

Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/

___ This story is part of an ongoing investigation led by The Associated Press in collaboration with the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism programs and FRONTLINE (PBS). The investigation includes the Lethal Restraint interactive story, database and the documentary, “Documenting Police Use Of Force,” premiering April 30 on PBS.


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Dozens of deaths reveal risks of injecting sedatives into people restrained by police

Demetrio Jackson was desperate for medical help when the paramedics arrived.

The 43-year-old was surrounded by police who arrested him after responding to a trespassing call in a Wisconsin parking lot. Officers had shocked him with a Taser and pinned him as he pleaded that he couldn’t breathe. Now he sat on the ground with hands cuffed behind his back and took in oxygen through a mask.

Then, officers moved Jackson to his side so a medic could inject him with a potent knockout drug.

“It’s just going to calm you down,” an officer assured Jackson. Within minutes, Jackson’s heart stopped. He never regained consciousness and died two weeks later.

Jackson’s 2021 death illustrates an often-hidden way fatal U.S. police encounters end: not with the firing of an officer’s gun but with the silent use of a medical syringe.

The practice of giving sedatives to people detained by police has spread quietly across the nation over the last 15 years, built on questionable science and backed by police-aligned experts, an investigation led by The Associated Press has found. Based on thousands of pages of law enforcement and medical records and videos of dozens of incidents, the investigation shows how a strategy intended to reduce violence and save lives has resulted in some avoidable deaths.

At least 94 people died after they were given sedatives and restrained by police from 2012 through 2021, according to findings by the AP in collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS) and the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism. That’s nearly 10% of the more than 1,000 deaths identified during the investigation of people subdued by police in ways that are not supposed to be fatal. About half of the 94 who died were Black, including Jackson.

Behind the racial disparity is a disputed medical condition called excited delirium, which fueled the rise of sedation outside hospitals. Critics say its purported symptoms, including “superhuman strength” and high pain tolerance, play into racist stereotypes about Black people and lead to biased decisions about who needs sedation.

The use of sedatives in half these incidents has never been reported, as scrutiny typically focuses on the actions of police, not medics. Elijah McClain’s 2019 death in Aurora, Colorado, was a rare exception: Two paramedics were convicted of giving McClain an overdose of ketamine, the same drug given to Jackson. One was sentenced last month to five years in prison and the second faces sentencing Friday.

It was impossible to determine the role sedatives may have played in each of the 94 deaths, which often involved the use of other potentially dangerous force on people who had taken drugs or consumed alcohol. Medical experts told the AP their impact could be negligible in people who were already dying; the final straw that triggered heart or breathing failure in the medically distressed; or the main cause of death when given in the wrong circumstances or mishandled.

While sedatives were mentioned as a cause or contributing factor in a dozen official death rulings, authorities often didn’t even investigate whether injections were appropriate. Medical officials have traditionally viewed them as mostly benign treatments. Now some say they may be playing a bigger role than previously understood and deserve more scrutiny.

Time and time again, the AP found, agitated people who were held by police facedown, often handcuffed and with officers pushing on their backs, struggled to breathe and tried to get free. Citing combativeness, paramedics administered sedatives, further slowing their breathing. Cardiac and respiratory arrest often occurred within minutes.

Paramedics drugged some people who were not a threat to themselves or others, violating treatment guidelines. Medics often didn’t know whether other drugs or alcohol were in people’s systems, although some combinations cause serious side effects.

Police officers sometimes improperly encouraged paramedics to give shots to suspects they were detaining.

Responders occasionally joked about the medications’ power to knock their subjects out. “Night, night” is heard on videos before deaths in California, Tennessee and Florida.

Emergency medical workers, “if they aren’t careful, can simply become an extension of the police’s handcuffs, of their weapons, of their nightsticks,” said Claire Zagorski, a paramedic and an addiction researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.

Supporters say sedatives enable rapid treatment for drug-related behavioral emergencies and psychotic episodes, protect front-line responders from violence and are safely administered thousands of times annually to get people with life-threatening conditions to hospitals. Critics say forced sedation should be strictly limited or banned, arguing the medications, given without consent, are too risky to be administered during police encounters.

Ohio State University professor Dr. Mark DeBard was an important early proponent of sedation, believing it could be used in rare cases when officers encountered extremely agitated people who needed rapid medical treatment. Today, he said he’s frustrated officers still sometimes use excessive force instead of treating those incidents as medical emergencies. He’s also surprised paramedics have given unnecessary injections by overdiagnosing excited delirium.

Others say the premise was flawed, with sedatives and police restraint creating a dangerous mix. The deaths have left a trail of grieving relatives from coast to coast.

“They’re running around on the streets administering these heavy-duty medications that could be lethal,” said Honey Gutzalenko, a nurse whose husband died after he was injected with midazolam in 2021 while restrained by police near San Francisco. “It’s just not right.”

Jackson was standing on a truck outside a radio station on the border of the small Wisconsin cities of Eau Claire and Altoona. An employee called 911 before dawn on Oct. 8, 2021, hoping officers could shoo away a stranger who “doesn’t seem to be a threat, but not normal either.”

Police video and hundreds of pages of law enforcement and medical records show how the incident escalated.

An Altoona police officer met Jackson in the parking lot. Jackson appeared uneasy and paranoid, looking around and talking softly. He had taken methamphetamine, which a psychiatrist said he used to self-medicate for schizophrenia. He’d been in and out of jail and living on the streets, with frequent visits to the emergency room seeking a place to rest.

The officer, joined by a second Altoona officer and a sheriff’s deputy, told him he could leave if he gave his name. Jackson refused.

Police identified him through his tattoos, learning he was on probation for meth possession. They noticed the truck had minor damage and decided to arrest him.

Jackson took off running. The officers chased Jackson, who stopped seconds later and staggered toward the first officer. Body-camera video shows she fired her Taser, its darts striking Jackson in the stomach and thigh. He screamed after the electrical shock and collapsed.

When officers couldn’t handcuff Jackson, she fired additional darts, striking Jackson in the back as he lay on the ground. Officers from the Eau Claire Police Department forced Jackson onto his stomach to be handcuffed and restrained him in what’s known as the prone position.

“I’m begging you to stop,” Jackson said. “I can’t breathe.”

After a couple of minutes, officers moved him to his side and then sat him up, trying to improve his breathing.

An officer wondered aloud whether Jackson had “excited delirium” and asked a colleague if paramedics were “going to stand around and do nothing.” He voiced approval when one arrived with ketamine, adding Jackson would not like it “when he gets poked.”

The Eau Claire Fire Department’s excited delirium protocol advises, “Rapid sedation is the key to de-escalation!!!!!” The medic measured 400 milligrams after estimating the 6-foot-tall Jackson weighed 175 pounds, enough to immobilize someone within minutes. He injected the medicine into Jackson’s buttocks.

Five medical experts who reviewed the case for AP said Jackson’s behavior did not appear to be dangerous enough to justify the intervention.

“I don’t believe he was a candidate for ketamine,” said Connecticut paramedic Peter Canning, who said he supports sedating truly violent patients because they stop fighting and are sleeping by the time they get to the hospital.

Minutes later, Jackson stopped breathing on the way to Sacred Heart Hospital. He’d suffered cardiac arrest and, after he was resuscitated, had no brain function.

Jackson’s mother, Rita Gowens, collapsed while shopping at an Indiana Walmart when she learned her oldest son was hospitalized and not expected to survive.

Gowens rushed to the hospital 500 miles away, where she was told he’d been injected with ketamine. She searched online and was stunned to read it’s used to tranquilize horses.

Gowens spoke to Jackson, held his hand and hoped for a miracle. She eventually agreed to remove him from a ventilator after his condition didn’t improve, singing into his ear as he took his final breaths: “You’ve never lost a battle, and I know, I know, you never will.”

She still has nightmares about how police and medics treated her son, whom she recalls as a happy boy with chunky cheeks that inspired the nickname “Meatball.” There are few days when she doesn’t ask, “Why did they give him an animal tranquilizer?”

The practice of using ketamine to subdue people outside hospitals began in 2004 when a disturbed man scaled a fence, cut himself with a broken bottle and paced along a narrow strip of concrete on a Minneapolis highway bridge.

The man was in danger of falling into traffic below when officers reached through the fence and grabbed him.

Dr. John Hick, who worked with first responders, heard the emergency radio chatter while driving and rushed to the scene with an idea. Hick gave the man two shots of ketamine, started an IV and kept him breathing with an air mask.

The man stopped struggling, and responders lowered him to safety.

Paramedics had occasionally used other sedatives to calm combative people since the 1980s. Hick and his Hennepin County Medical Center colleague Dr. Jeffrey Ho believed ketamine worked faster and had fewer side effects, showing promise to avert fatal police encounters.

Ho was a leading researcher on Taser safety and an expert witness for the company in wrongful death lawsuits. In a 2007 deposition in one such case, he argued for a potentially “life-saving tactic” of having sedative injections quickly follow Taser shocks, saying the combination could shorten struggles that, if prolonged, might end in death.

Some doctors at his public hospital in Minneapolis were using “something called ketamine, which is an analog to LSD,” he said. “It’s sort of an animal tranquilizer.”

The drug became more common outside the hospital in 2008 when Hennepin County paramedics were given permission to use it.

An American College of Emergency Physicians panel that included Ho said in 2009 that ketamine had shown “excellent results and safety” while acknowledging no research proved it would save lives.

In time, its use became standard from Las Vegas to Columbus, Ohio, to Palm Beach County, Florida. The earliest death involving ketamine documented in AP’s investigation came in 2015, when 34-year-old Juan Carrizales was injected after struggling with police in the Dallas suburb of Garland, Texas.

Shortly after ketamine became authorized for such use in Arizona in 2017, deputies who were restraining David Cutler facedown in handcuffs in the scorching desert asked a paramedic to sedate him.

The medic testified he was surprised when Cutler stopped breathing, although the dose was larger than recommended for someone weighing 132 pounds. He said he had been trained that ketamine didn’t impact respiration. Cutler’s death was ruled an accident due to heat exposure and LSD — though that was disputed by experts hired by Cutler’s family, who said heat stroke along with ketamine caused his death.

In Minneapolis, an oversight agency found the use of ketamine during police calls rose dramatically from 2012 through 2017 and body-camera video showed instances of officers appearing to pressure paramedics to use ketamine and joking about its power. The department told officers they could never “suggest or demand” the use of sedation.

Facing criticism, Hennepin Healthcare halted a study examining the effectiveness of ketamine on agitated patients. The Food and Drug Administration later found the research failed to protect vulnerable, intoxicated people who had not given consent.

By 2021, the American College of Emergency Physicians warned ketamine impacted breathing and the heart more than previously believed.

“Ketamine is not as benign as we might have hoped it to be,” a co-author of the new position, Dr. Jeffrey Goodloe, said on the group’s podcast in 2022.

He said the practice of giving large doses of ketamine, sometimes too much for smaller patients, had spread nationwide as agencies copied each other’s protocols with little independent review.

But the AP’s findings show risks of sedation go beyond ketamine, which was used in at least 19 cases.

Roughly half of the 94 deaths documented by the AP came after the use of midazolam, which has long been known to heighten the risk of respiratory depression. Many came during police encounters in California, where ketamine is not widely used. Midazolam, a common pre-surgery drug known by the brand name Versed, is also part of a three-drug cocktail used in some states to execute prisoners.

Other cases involved a range of other drugs, including the antipsychotic medications haloperidol and ziprasidone, which can cause irregular heartbeats.

The need for monitoring side effects is often laid out for paramedics in written guidelines, many of which are based on the disputed belief that excited delirium can cause sudden death.

The theory of excited delirium was troubling from the start.

In the 1980s, with cocaine use soaring, Dr. Charles Wetli, a Miami forensic pathologist, coined the term to explain a handful of deaths of violent cocaine users, many of whom had been restrained by police. Wetli, who died in 2020, also blamed excited delirium for the mysterious deaths of more than a dozen Black women. He said cocaine and sexual activity triggered the fatal condition.

The women’s deaths eventually were attributed to a serial killer. Wetli’s theory survived. And over time, symptoms described by Wetli and others — “superhuman strength,” animal-like noises and high pain tolerance — became disproportionately assigned to Black people. The terms spread to police and emergency medical services to describe certain agitated people — and explain sudden deaths.

By the mid-2000s, police were encountering more drug users and mentally ill people as stimulant use increased and psychiatric hospitals closed. Departments adopted Tasers as a less-lethal alternative to firearms, but there was a problem — hundreds died after being jolted.

Supporters of Wetli’s research, including the medical examiner in Miami-Dade County, ruled again and again that excited delirium was the cause of these deaths, not the effects of the weapons and other physical force. Executives at Taser’s manufacturer agreed, promoting excited delirium to medical examiners around the country and retaining experts who explained the concept to juries in wrongful death lawsuits.

In 2006, a grand jury that investigated Taser-related deaths in Miami-Dade recommended an untested treatment that it said could save people before they died from excited delirium: squirting midazolam up their noses to cause “almost immediate sedation.” Its report acknowledged they “may experience difficulty in breathing.” Miami-Dade paramedics adopted this treatment.

But key medical groups didn’t recognize excited delirium, and activists were calling for limits on Taser use. What happened next would help promote sedation alongside Tasers as tools to gain control.

In 2008, the biggest names in excited delirium research gathered at a Las Vegas hotel for a three-day meeting organized by a group with ties to Taser’s manufacturer.

“A lot of talk took place on chemical sedation because the cops didn’t know what to do with these people,” recalled John Peters, president of the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, which sponsored the meeting. “Jeff Ho had done some work up in Minnesota. He said, ‘Look. I’ve been using ketamine. It knocks them out quicker.’”

The timing was fortuitous: The American College of Emergency Physicians would soon form a task force to study excited delirium and how police and medics should respond.

The 19-member panel included Ho, who became Taser’s medical director under an arrangement in which the company paid part of his hospital salary; Dr. Donald Dawes, a Taser research consultant; and University of Miami researcher Deborah Mash, who testified for Taser about several deaths she blamed on excited delirium. At least two other panelists were routinely retained by officers and their departments as expert witnesses.

The panel’s 2009 paper disclosed none of these relationships. It found excited delirium was real, could result in death regardless of whether someone was shocked with a Taser and called for “aggressive chemical sedation” to treat the symptoms.

DeBard, the Ohio doctor who chaired the panel, told AP he recruited relevant experts to join and that disclosure of conflicts wasn’t required by the ER doctors group then. He said Taser didn’t influence the outcome, which reflected the panel’s consensus. Mash said she had no conflict because Taser didn’t fund her research. Dawes declined an interview request. Ho didn’t return messages.

Taser rebranded itself in 2017 as Axon. A spokesperson for the company declined interview requests and did not respond to written questions.

Dr. Brooks Walsh, an emergency physician in Connecticut who was not on the panel, said the 2009 paper reinforced racial bias as it formalized “loaded terms” used to describe excited delirium, influencing how the diagnosis would be applied.

Ho and other Taser- and police-aligned experts joined a federally sponsored panel in 2011 that built on the work, recommending four actions on a checklist for officers and paramedics: Identify excited delirium symptoms; control (with a Taser if necessary); sedate; and transport to a hospital.

No test measures for excited delirium, so paramedics faced a judgment call: Which patients were so agitated, strong, impervious to pain and dangerous that they needed to be sedated?

DeBard said the symptoms were based on medical observations, not race. “If you’ve got somebody that’s delirious, irrational, aggressive, hyperactive, running around naked, I mean, it’s really pretty easy” to recognize, he said.

Yet, over time, prominent medical groups and some experts pointed to overuse of sedation during police encounters and a disproportionate impact on Black people. Even supporters of the practice have acknowledged that the wrong patients at times have been injected.

The deaths of Black men in police custody, including the 2020 killing of George Floyd, put pressure on the medical community to re-examine excited delirium. The ER doctors group in 2023 withdrew approval of the 2009 paper and said excited delirium shouldn’t be used in court testimony. Some doctors called that decision political and note the group still recognizes a similar condition — hyperactive delirium with severe agitation — that can be treated with sedation. But today no major medical association legitimizes excited delirium.

In more than a dozen cases reviewed by AP, police asked for or suggested the use of sedatives, calling into question whether medics were working for law enforcement or in patients’ interests. Officers often suggested their detainees had excited delirium.

University of California, Berkeley, law and bioethics professor Osagie Obasogie, who has studied excited delirium and sedation, said officers should be banned from influencing medical care.

“We need to be sure that folks are treated in a way that meets their medical needs and not simply given a chemical restraint because it’s convenient for law enforcement,” he said.

Officers are told not to dictate medical treatment but “some knuckleheads” have done otherwise, said Peters, whose group hosted the 2008 Las Vegas meeting that focused on excited delirium.

Paramedics say they make medical decisions independently from police, following guidelines that call for sedating people who may be dangerous. But in several cases AP found, people were injected though they had calmed down or even passed out after struggles with police.

Ivan Gutzalenko, a 47-year-old father, was struggling to breathe as two officers restrained him in Richmond, California. Gutzalenko told the officers they were hurting him, and bucked to try to get one off his back.

A paramedic viewed Gutzalenko’s action as aggression, and went to his ambulance to get a 5-milligram dose of midazolam. When he returned three minutes later, Gutzalenko lay motionless. “He’s faking like he’s unconscious,” an officer said.

The medic plunged the needle into his bicep. Gutzalenko’s heart stopped. He was declared dead at a hospital. A pathologist testified that midazolam was given to “quiet him down” during an episode of excited delirium but did not contribute to the death, which he blamed on prone restraint and meth use.

His wife said Gutzalenko, a former critical care nurse, would never have consented to receive midazolam that day.

“I know from being a registered nurse since 2004, you don’t administer a sedative to someone who is clearly already in respiratory distress,” she said, adding that his death has been devastating to their two teenage children.

Dr. Gail Van Norman, a University of Washington professor of anesthesiology and pain medicine, said it’s dangerous for officers to put pressure on the backs and necks of detainees before and after they’re injected with sedatives.

“It’s a recipe for disaster, because you may have created a situation in which you are impeding a person’s ability to get oxygen,” she said.

The AP investigation found half who died following sedation had been shocked with a Taser and the majority had been restrained facedown.

Their blood acid levels may already have been spiking from drugs, adrenaline and pain while oxygen levels may have been plummeting — life-threatening conditions called acidosis and hypoxia.

Sedatives can dull the instinct to compensate by breathing quickly and heavily to blow off carbon dioxide, essential for the heart to beat, said Dr. Christopher Stephens, a UTHealth Houston anesthesiologist and former paramedic.

Under sedation, he said, the body doesn’t respond as efficiently to the buildup of carbon dioxide. “Your brain doesn’t care as much about it,” Stephens said. “And they can go into respiratory and cardiac arrest.”

Paramedics usually have no idea whether their patients have alcohol, opioids or other depressants in their bodies that increase sedatives’ effects on breathing.

More than a dozen who died had been drinking, including Jerica LaCour, 29, a Colorado Springs, Colorado, mother of five young children.

She was stressed about family finances, husband Anthony LaCour recalled, when deputies found her trespassing at a trucking company.

“Guess who gets ketamine?” paramedic Jason Poulson of AMR, the nation’s largest ambulance company, said as LaCour was restrained on a gurney, according to body-camera footage.

An EMT said in a report that she told Poulson that LaCour had calmed and didn’t need ketamine, and later warned that LaCour was no longer breathing. In a disciplinary agreement with state regulators, Poulson admitted he was unsuccessful in protecting LaCour’s airway despite multiple attempts, mishandled the syringe and failed to document the ketamine use properly. His state certification was put on probation.

AMR and Poulson deny responsibility for LaCour’s death in her family’s pending lawsuit, arguing LaCour was experiencing excited delirium and ketamine was appropriate.

When people died, the use of sedation often went unacknowledged publicly and unquestioned by investigators.

After Jackson’s death in Wisconsin, police press releases said nothing about ketamine. State police redacted mention of the drug from investigation records and blurred video of the prone restraint and injection, saying his family’s privacy outweighed the public interest in disclosure.

The fire department, which declined comment, blacked out the information in its incident report. But when AP uploaded the document, redactions disappeared, revealing Jackson was given 400 milligrams of ketamine.

An autopsy concluded Jackson died from complications caused by meth. The report said Jackson’s ketamine dose was 100 milligrams, a quarter of what the fire department report said.

Two longtime forensic pathologists who reviewed the case for AP said meth use wasn’t the only factor. Dr. Joye Carter said she believed the police altercation and ketamine caused the death, saying the sedative can cause heart problems when given to a meth user.

Dr. Victor Weedn said the level of meth in Jackson’s blood was high but generally not lethal. He said Jackson likely died from high blood acid levels, with police restraint and possibly ketamine contributing.

The autopsy was performed in Ramsey County, Minnesota. A county spokesperson defended the findings from a now-retired medical examiner, saying the discrepancy on the ketamine dose wasn’t significant.

Citing the autopsy’s finding that meth was the cause, Eau Claire County District Attorney Peter Rindal ruled Jackson’s case was not an “officer-involved death” under Wisconsin law and closed the investigation.

In nearly 90% of the deaths examined by AP, coroners and medical examiners did not list sedation as a cause or contributing factor. Some autopsy reports failed to document that the deceased had been sedated.

The most common ruling was an accidental death in which other drugs, often meth or cocaine, were causes or contributing factors. More than a quarter were at least partially attributed to excited delirium.

Medical examiners view sedatives as safe treatments to control patients and wouldn’t question their use unless there was a grievous error, said Dr. James Gill, the chief medical examiner of Connecticut and past president of the National Association of Medical Examiners.

“Generally we’re going to default then back to what’s the underlying disease or injury that started this chain of events,” Gill said.

He said sedatives rarely cause deaths by themselves but additional studies could look at whether they play a role in fatal police struggles where many factors are involved.

Even when autopsies implicated sedatives, investigations didn’t always follow.

In LaCour’s case, the coroner found she died from “respiratory arrest associated with acute alcohol and ketamine intoxication.” The district attorney’s office said it had no record of reviewing her death.

Nine miles from LaCour’s injection, a paramedic injected 26-year-old Hunter Barr with ketamine as officers held him facedown in the dirt outside his Colorado Springs home in September 2020.

Retired postal worker Mark Barr had called 911 for help controlling his son, who he said wasn’t violent but was having a bad reaction to LSD. He watched as a medic gave two injections just minutes apart. He said he couldn’t figure out why the second injection was necessary, saying his son was subdued. Hunter Barr became unconscious on the way to a hospital and died within hours.

The coroner ruled Barr died from the effects of ketamine. The Colorado Springs Police Department closed the case as “non-criminal” and the DA’s office again had no review.

When deaths were investigated, inquiries usually focused on whether police used excessive force. In audio and video reviewed by AP, investigators seemed uninterested in how sedation may have contributed.

“I’m not trying to get in the weeds with a whole bunch of that,” an investigator told a paramedic explaining the ketamine injection he gave 18-year-old Giovani Berne before Berne’s heart stopped in Palm Bay, Florida, in 2016.

Berne’s sister, Christina, said the family didn’t know he had been given ketamine until contacted by AP years later, but “we knew something bad happened in the ambulance.” A medical examiner ruled that Berne died of excited delirium.

The death of McClain, 23, in Colorado is the only one that resulted in charges against paramedics. Prosecutors argued Aurora paramedics Jeremy Cooper and Peter Cichuniec didn’t assess McClain, gave him too much ketamine for someone his size and didn’t monitor him afterward.

Their convictions shook the EMS field, whose leaders say treatment mistakes shouldn’t be criminalized. Defense attorneys argued the paramedics followed their training on excited delirium and ketamine. A judge gave Cichuniec five years in prison while Cooper is scheduled to be sentenced Friday.

Civil liability is also rare, in part because deaths have multiple causes and some courts have ruled that unwilling injections aren’t excessive force even when they cause harm. That hasn’t stopped families from trying: A number of wrongful death lawsuits involving sedation are pending.

Lawmakers in Colorado banned excited delirium as a justification for using ketamine and put other restrictions on the drug, but changes in the law elsewhere have been few.

Paramedic reformers are working to address the failures that increase the risk of sedatives contributing to deaths.

Paramedic Eric Jaeger helped rewrite New Hampshire’s protocols and, at a fire station in Hooksett, recently used Jackson’s death as a training scenario after evaluating the case for AP. He questioned whether sedation was necessary. He said medics failed to thoroughly evaluate Jackson and should have had monitoring equipment ready before any injection.

He said he had been aware of a handful of deaths but the number found by AP “dramatically increases” the scope.

“If we don’t change the training, change the protocols, change the leadership to make the system safer,” Jaeger said, “then we all bear responsibility for future deaths.”

___

Associated Press researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.

___

The Associated Press receives support from the Public Welfare Foundation for reporting focused on criminal justice. This story also was supported by Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures. Also, the AP Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

___

Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/

___ This story is part of an ongoing investigation led by The Associated Press in collaboration with the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism programs and FRONTLINE (PBS). The investigation includes the Lethal Restraint interactive story, database and the documentary, “Documenting Police Use Of Force,” premiering April 30 on PBS.


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Daimler Truck faces imminent strike by over 7,300 US workers

By Nathan Gomes

(Reuters) – Daimler Truck must reach a new labor contract with over 7,300 hourly workers at six facilities in the U.S. South by the end of Friday or face a possible strike by the United Auto Workers (UAW) union members.

The workers are seeking higher pay, institution of cost-of-living adjustments and greater job security from the heavy-truck maker, UAW President Shawn Fain said during an online speech earlier this week.

    “Workers’ wages at Daimler have not kept up,” he said on Tuesday. “The workers are going to come for their fair share. In the new UAW, we don’t take concessions. We raise standards for everyone and we fight for what we deserve, and we’re not afraid to strike to get it.”

Fain is scheduled to hold a press conference at 10 pm ET, ahead of a midnight ET strike deadline, during which he is expected to outline whether a strike will occur.

The UAW, under Fain, has been aggressive in seeking large raises and other concessions from companies for its members. Last fall, UAW secured large payouts, including 25% pay raises over the life of the new deals, at the Detroit Three automakers – General Motors, Ford and Stellantis.

At Daimler Truck, which makes Freightliner and Western Star trucks and Thomas Built buses, about 96% of workers at four factories in North Carolina, and parts warehouses in Georgia and Tennessee voted in March to authorize a strike.

The union has filed unfair labor practice charges with the U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against the company, citing violation of workers’ rights and federal labor laws, and for failing to bargain in good faith.

Daimler Truck did not respond to a Reuters’ request for a comment on the matter.

Since the deals last fall with the Detroit Three, the UAW has turned its efforts to organizing non-union U.S. plants of more than a dozen automakers.

The UAW clinched a historic victory at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee last week, and workers at a Mercedes factory in Vance, Alabama, are going to vote on whether to join the labor union during the week of May 13.

(Reporting by Nathan Gomes in Bengaluru, additional reporting by Ben Klayman in Detroit; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)


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Colorado paramedic to be sentenced in Elijah McClain’s death, bringing case to a close

By Brad Brooks

BRIGHTON, Colorado (Reuters) – A Colorado judge on Friday is expected to sentence a paramedic convicted in the 2019 death of Elijah McClain, the last defendant to face jail time for the young Black man’s death.

McClain, 23, died after police slammed him to the ground soon after stopping him and put him in a chokehold at least twice. Paramedics injected him with an excessive dose of ketamine, an anesthetic used for sedation, after police said he was in a state of “excited delirium.” McClain was not suspected of any wrongdoing when he was walking on the street and police stopped him.

The sentencing of Jeremy Cooper, 49, who faces up to three years in prison for his conviction last December of criminally negligent homicide, closes out the three trials around McClain’s death. One police officer was sentenced to 14 months in prison, two officers were found not guilty, and Cooper’s fellow paramedic was sentenced to five years. Paramedics rarely face charges in such cases.

Colorado has undergone significant police reforms since the killing of McClain and the following year’s racial justice protests ignited by the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. Politicians and experts say even more must be done.

“It should not be the way that we have to make policy, to do so based on someone being murdered, like Elijah McClain,” said Colorado state Representative Leslie Herod.

“But when Elijah McClain was murdered, we were able to make a lot of progress in a lot of areas that people wanted to ignore or say did not happen here in Colorado,” the Democrat said.

Herod said one of the most impactful measures of a sweeping 2020 police reform bill she co-sponsored spelled out that officers have a duty to intervene if they see a colleague committing civil rights violations.

Herod said she is now focusing on providing whistleblower protections for police officers, and said new laws are needed to ensure, for example, that independent bodies investigate allegations against police.

Among other Colorado laws and measures taken since McClain’s death that even more directly stem from the details of his case:

– The banning of chokeholds;

– Prohibitions on police officers pushing paramedics to use the ketamine on a suspect;

– Banning police trainers from instructing on “excited delirium,” which some experts say is a racially charged pseudo-diagnosis.

‘BATTLEGROUND’ FOR REFORM

David Pyrooz, a University of Colorado criminologist, said Colorado had some of the largest racial justice protests in 2020 outside of those in Minneapolis, and that the public pressure helped turn the state “into a battleground for police reform.”

While that is positive, he said, Pyrooz cautioned that more scrutiny and regulation is going to lead some people to think twice about pursuing police careers.

Alexander Landau, co-director of the Denver Justice Project, a community group pushing for police reforms, said McClain’s case also puts a focus on district attorneys – the elected officials who decide if charges are even brought.

In McClain’s case, the local district attorney declined to press any charges, which were only brought after the state attorney general’s office stepped in.

“Influencing broader community members to pay attention to those district attorney races, and who the candidates are, is very important to helping shift the violent and racist practices in any law enforcement department,” Landau said.

(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Brighton, Colorado; editing by Donna Bryson and Aurora Ellis)


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Former tabloid publisher to face more questions in Trump hush-money trial

By Jack Queen, Jody Godoy and Andy Sullivan

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker will answer more questions about his efforts to suppress damaging information about Donald Trump during the 2016 election, as the former president’s criminal hush-money trial continues on Friday.

Pecker, 72, will face questioning from Trump’s lawyers, who have sought to illustrate that the tabloid’s practice of burying unflattering stories about famous people was well established before Trump ran for president.

Pecker previously testified that he worked as Trump’s “eyes and ears” to suppress stories which could have hurt the businessman-turned-politician’s presidential bid at a time when he was facing multiple accusations of sexual misbehavior.

Pecker said his tabloid paid to “catch and kill” two of those stories and alerted Trump that porn star Stormy Daniels was also looking to sell her story of a sexual encounter with Trump.

New York prosecutors have charged Trump with falsifying business records to cover up a hush-money payment to Daniels. Trump has pleaded not guilty and denies the encounter took place.

Trump’s lawyers sought on Thursday to illustrate to the jury that Pecker’s checkbook journalism was not confined to Trump.

Under questioning, Pecker said it was normal for celebrities and politicians to curry favor with the Enquirer to get good publicity and that he sought to kill negative stories about other famous figures, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tiger Woods.

He said the Enquirer paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to obtain stories from women who came forward during Schwarzenegger’s 2003 run for California governor to say they had affairs with him.

Pecker said the first time he gave Trump a heads up about a negative story was in 1998 in relation to Marla Maples, his wife at the time.

Pecker said he still considered Trump a friend, even though the two have not spoken since 2019.

Prosecutors say Pecker’s arrangement with Trump corrupted the 2016 election. He agreed to cooperate to avoid criminal charges.

Trump is the first former president to face criminal charges. The trial, which is expected to run through May, could be the only one of his four criminal prosecutions to be completed before his Nov. 5 rematch with Democratic President Joe Biden.

One of those cases, which charges Trump with trying to overturn his 2020 loss to Biden, has been delayed for months by the U.S. Supreme Court as it considers Trump’s argument that presidents should be immune for actions they take while in office.

In oral arguments on Thursday, justices on the conservative-majority court signaled support that Trump should have some level of protection from criminal charges.

(Reporting by Jack Queen and Jody Godoy in New York and Andy Sullivan in Washington; Writing by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Daniel Wallis)


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US probes Tesla recall of 2 million vehicles over Autopilot, citing concerns

By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. auto safety regulators said Friday they have opened an investigation into whether Tesla’s recall of more than 2 million vehicles announced in December to install new Autopilot safeguards is adequate.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said it was opening an investigation after the agency identified concerns due to crash events after vehicles had the recall software update installed “and results from preliminary NHTSA tests of remedied vehicles.”

The agency’s new probe comes after it closed its nearly three-year investigation into Autopilot, saying it found evidence that “Tesla’s weak driver engagement system was not appropriate for Autopilot’s permissive operating capabilities” that result in a “critical safety gap.”

NHTSA also cited Tesla’s statement “that a portion of the remedy both requires the owner to opt in and allows a driver to readily reverse it.”

The agency said Tesla has issued software updates to address issues that appear related to its concerns but has not made them “a part of the recall or otherwise determined to remedy a defect that poses an unreasonable safety risk.”

Tesla said in December’s its largest-ever recall covering 2.03 million U.S. vehicles – or nearly all of its vehicles on U.S. roads – was to better ensure drivers pay attention when using its advanced driver assistance system.

The new recall investigation covers Model Y, X, S, 3 and Cybertruck vehicles in the U.S. equipped with Autopilot produced between the 2012 and 2024 model years, NHTSA said.

Tesla said in December Autopilot’s software system controls “may not be sufficient to prevent driver misuse” and could increase the risk of a crash.

The auto safety agency disclosed Friday that during its Autopilot safety probe it first launched in August 2021 it identified at least 13 Tesla crashes involving one or more death and many more involving serious injuries in which “foreseeable driver misuse of the system played an apparent role.”

NHTSA also on Friday raised concerns about Tesla’s Autopilot name “may lead drivers to believe that the automation has

greater capabilities than it does and invite drivers to overly trust the automation.”

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In February, Consumer Reports, a nonprofit organization that evaluates products and services, said its testing of Tesla’s Autopilot recall update found changes did not adequately address many safety concerns raised by NHTSA and urged the agency to require the automaker to take “stronger steps,” saying Tesla’s recall “addresses minor inconveniences rather than fixing the real problems.”

Tesla’s Autopilot is intended to enable cars to steer, accelerate and brake automatically within their lane, while enhanced Autopilot can assist in changing lanes on highways but does not make vehicles autonomous.

One component of Autopilot is Autosteer, which maintains a set speed or following distance and works to keep a vehicle in its driving lane.

Tesla said in December it did not agree with NHTSA’s analysis but would deploy an over-the-air software update that will “incorporate additional controls and alerts to those already existing on affected vehicles to further encourage the driver to adhere to their continuous driving responsibility whenever Autosteer is engaged.”

NHTSA’s then top official, Ann Carlson, said in December the agency probe determined that more needed to be done to ensure drivers are engaged when Autopilot is in use. “One of the things we determined is that drivers are not always paying attention when that system is on,” Carlson said.

NHTSA opened its August 2021 probe of Autopilot after identifying more than a dozen crashes in which Tesla vehicles hit stationary emergency vehicles.

NHTSA said in December it found Autopilot “can provide inadequate driver engagement and usage controls that can lead to foreseeable misuse.”

Separately, since 2016, NHTSA has opened more than 40 Tesla special crash investigations in cases where driver systems such as Autopilot were suspected of being used, with 23 crash deaths reported to date.

Tesla’s recall includes increasing prominence of visual alerts and disengaging of Autosteer if drivers do not respond to inattentiveness warnings and additional checks upon engaging Autosteer. Tesla said it will restrict Autopilot use for one week if significant improper usage is detected.

Tesla disclosed in October the U.S. Justice Department issued subpoenas related to its Full Self-Driving (FSD) and Autopilot. Reuters reported in October 2022 that Tesla was under criminal investigation.

Tesla in February 2023 recalled 362,000 U.S. vehicles to update its FSD Beta software after NHTSA said the vehicles did not adequately adhere to traffic safety laws and could cause crashes.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; editing by Jason Neely and Louise Heavens)


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Paramedic sentencing in Elijah McClain’s death caps trials that led to 3 convictions

DENVER (AP) — Almost five years after Elijah McClain died following a police stop in which he was put in a neck hold and injected with the powerful sedative ketamine, three of the five Denver-area responders prosecuted in the Black man’s death have been convicted.

Experts say the convictions would have been unheard of before 2020, when George Floyd’s murder sparked a nationwide reckoning over racist policing and deaths in police custody.

But McClain’s mother, Sheneen McClain, said justice has not yet been served. Previously, she has said the two acquitted Aurora police officers, as well as other firefighters and police on the scene, were complicit in her 23-year-old son’s murder and that they escaped justice.

“I’m waiting on heaven to hand down everybody’s judgment. Because I know heaven ain’t gonna miss the mark,” she told The Associated Press.

She plans to speak on Friday at a sentencing hearing in a Denver suburb, at which Jeremy Cooper, a former Aurora Fire Rescue paramedic, faces up to three years in prison. He was convicted of criminally negligent homicide in December.

Cooper’s sentencing hearing caps a series of trials that stretched over seven months and resulted in the convictions of a police officer and two paramedics. The paramedics’ conviction sent shock waves through the ranks of EMTs across the nation because of the rarity of criminal charges brought against medical professionals in their role, according to experts.

McClain’s name became a rallying cry in protests over racial injustice in policing that swept the U.S. in 2020.

“Without the reckoning over criminal justice and how people of color suffer at much higher rates from police use of force and violence, it’s very unlikely that anything would have come of this, that there would have been any charges, let alone convictions,” said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor and expert on racial profiling.

Harris added that the acquittals of the two officers following weekslong trials were unsurprising, since juries are often reluctant to second guess the actions of police and other first responders.

“It’s still very hard to convict,” he said.

The same judge who will preside over the hearing Friday sentenced ex-paramedic Peter Cichuniec in March to five years in prison for criminally negligent homicide and second-degree assault, the most serious of the charges faced by any of the responders. It was the shortest sentence allowed under the law.

Previously, Judge Mark Warner sentenced officer Randy Roedema to 14 months in jail for criminally negligent homicide and misdemeanor assault.

Prosecutors initially declined to pursue charges related to McClain’s death when an autopsy did not determine how he died. But Democratic Gov. Jared Polis ordered the investigation reopened following the 2020 protests against police brutality.

The second autopsy said McClain died because he was injected with ketamine after being forcibly restrained.

To Sheneen McClain, it doesn’t make sense that officer Nathan Woodyard, who stopped her son and put him in a neck hold, was acquitted, while officer Roedema received a lighter sentence than the paramedic Cichuniec. She thinks the paramedics’ role was to cover up what the police had done to her son.

She plans to address the court at Friday’s sentencing hearing.

“I raised him by myself and I will continue to stand there for my son, regardless of whether anybody listens to me or not,” she said.

Since the killings of Floyd, McClain and others put a spotlight on police custody deaths, many departments, paramedic units and those that train them have reexamined how they treat suspects. It could take years though to collect enough evidence to show if those efforts are working, said Candace McCoy, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Cooper injected McClain with ketamine after police stopped him as he was walking home. Officers later referenced a suspicious person report. McClain was not armed, nor accused of breaking any laws.

Medical experts said by the time he received the sedative, McClain already was in a weakened state from forcible restraint that rendered him temporarily unconscious.

He went into cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital and died three days later.

Cooper’s attorneys did not immediately respond to telephone messages and emails seeking comment on the sentencing.

Since McClain’s death, the Colorado health department has told paramedics not to give ketamine to people suspected of having excited delirium, which had been described in a since-withdrawn emergency physicians’ report as manifesting symptoms including increased strength. A doctors group has called it an unscientific definition rooted in racism.

The protests over McClain and Floyd also ushered in a wave of state legislation to curb the use of neck holds known as carotid restraints, which cut off circulation, and chokeholds, which cut off breathing. At least 27 states including Colorado have passed some limit on the practices. Only two had bans in place before Floyd was killed.

To MiDian Holmes, a racial justice advocate who attended the trials against the first responders, change isn’t coming fast enough.

“It’s the message that the life of Elijah mattered but it didn’t matter enough,” Holmes said.


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A look at past and future cases Harvey Weinstein has faced as his New York conviction is thrown out

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Harvey Weinstein’s landmark New York sexual assault conviction was thrown out by an appeals court Thursday, and most of the dozens of civil cases filed against him since he became a central target in the #MeToo movement in 2017 have either been settled or dismissed.

That doesn’t mean the 72-year-old disgraced movie mogul and his lawyers don’t have plenty of court time ahead. Prosecutors in Manhattan say they plan to retry him, and several other cases remain unresolved.

Here’s a look at those, and at some that have come and gone:

Weinstein was found guilty in 2022 in Los Angeles of the rape and sexual assault of Italian actor and model Evgeniya Chernyshova, and his 16-year sentence in that case will keep him in prison despite the reversal of the New York verdict.

Of the four women he was charged with assaulting in California, this was the only case that led to a conviction. Weinstein insisted at his sentencing that he never met her.

An appeal looms there too, and Weinstein’s attorneys will make the same arguments as in the New York case about witnesses testifying to assaults he was not charged with.

Los Angeles prosecutors said Thursday that the judge at their trial acted well within state law in the testimony she allowed. Weinstein’s lawyers must make their case in a filing by May 20.

Weinstein could be brought to California to serve the sentence in that case, or he could remain behind bars in New York while awaiting retrial.

Chernyshova also is the plaintiff in one of the last remaining civil lawsuits against Weinstein. Just weeks after the guilty verdict, she sued over emotional distress from her 2013 rape at a Beverly Hills hotel.

Weinstein’s attorneys argued at his sentencing in the criminal case that the lawsuit constituted proof that she lied on the stand when she said she sought no financial gain from coming forward with her allegations.

The civil case remains in its early stages. At a hearing Thursday, just a few hours after the New York decision was revealed, a judge tentatively granted Chernyshova’s request that it be put on hold while the California criminal appeal plays out.

Like other actors including Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino, Julia Ormond, briefly a major star in the 1990s, has alleged in a lawsuit that Weinstein railroaded her career.

Ormond, who appeared opposite Brad Pitt in “Legends of the Fall” and Harrison Ford in “Sabrina,” filed her suit in New York last October. In it she accused Weinstein of committing sexual battery against her in 1995 and then working to tarnish her reputation in Hollywood.

The newest of the known lawsuits against Weinstein, it came years after most of the others. Ormond took advantage of New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which allowed a temporary window for people who allege sexual assault to file past the state’s normal deadlines.

Weinstein’s lawyers denied her allegations.

Judd, who became a hugely important figure in the takedown of Weinstein and larger #MeToo movement when she went on the record in the original New York Times story about his sexual misconduct, sued him in 2018. Like Ormond she alleged Weinstein did major damage to her career by smearing her to other filmmakers in retaliation for rejecting his sexual advances.

Her lawsuit, which came after director Peter Jackson said Weinstein told him 20 years earlier that Judd was a “nightmare” to work with when Jackson was considering her for a major role in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, accused Weinstein of defamation, sexual harassment and violating California’s unfair competition labor law.

A federal judge in 2019 threw out the sexual harassment claim, saying Weinstein and Judd, as a producer and actor discussing prospective projects, didn’t have the kind of employment relationship that the law covers. California lawmakers later expanded the statute to explicitly cover producers and directors.

Judd’s lawsuit is now on long-term hold. A judge administratively closed it last year, but it can be reopened at any time if her legal team makes a motion.

Some suits were thrown out, including one from actor Rose McGowan, one of Weinstein’s earliest and most prominent accusers. She alleged he engaged in racketeering when he worked to silence her and harm her career before she publicly accused him of rape, which he has denied.

McGowan served as her own attorney in the case after firing her lawyers. In 2021, a federal judge dismissed the suit with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled.

The vast majority of lawsuits against Weinstein, by women from office assistants to successful actors, were brought to a close through a settlement in 2021 as part of the bankruptcy of his former film company, The Weinstein Co.

The agreement included a victims’ fund of about $17 million for some 40 women who sued him. The amount was approved by a majority, but lawyers for some of them, including actor Dominique Huett, objected to it, calling the individual shares “pathetically meager” for the damage Weinstein did.

Also part of the settlement was former actor and screenwriter Louisette Geiss, the lead plaintiff in a Manhattan class action suit. She sued Weinstein in 2017, accusing him of attempting to force her to watch him masturbate in a hotel bathroom in 2008.

“In the end, you see that the judicial system is still not in the right place to take him down. It’s really society that takes him down,” she told The Associated Press the year after the settlement.

The AP does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly, as all of the women named here have done.


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